{"id":12863,"date":"2015-02-25T05:00:43","date_gmt":"2015-02-25T13:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bullmensfiction.com\/?p=12863"},"modified":"2022-08-03T13:14:58","modified_gmt":"2022-08-03T17:14:58","slug":"bullshot-matt-briggs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/fiction\/bullshot-matt-briggs\/","title":{"rendered":"BULLshot: Matt Briggs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div style=\"color: #222222\"><span style=\"color: #000000\">BE: How is writing directly about personal beliefs in an essay different from tapping those beliefs and experiences for fiction?<\/span><\/div>\n<div style=\"color: #222222\"><\/div>\n<div style=\"color: #222222\"><\/div>\n<div style=\"color: #222222\">MB: In fiction I am attempting to create the illusion of a person out of thin air. That illusion\u00a0depends on a consistency that is far more rigorous than a real person.\u00a0My own identity isn\u2019t nearly as fixed or as predictable as a character in fiction. For one thing I often don\u2019t really know what my beliefs are in the real world. However, in fiction\u00a0 because a character can say or do anything, there is a constant question in the audience about selection.\u00a0The author has selected detail in fiction from a universe of made up things and so the question is always there in fiction, why this detail? There is a scene in chapter five of EM Forster\u2019s\u00a0Howard\u2019s End. In the Merchant Ivory\u00a0adaptation there is a lecture on Beethoven\u2019s Fifth\u00a0and the lecturer portrays a particular passage\u00a0of music as belonging to a goblin, and an old man in the audience gets up and asks what is to be a sensible question, \u201cWhy a\u00a0goblin?\u201d\u00a0All the words, beliefs, concepts, and things in fiction have to be aligned\u00a0in fiction into\u00a0something coherent\u00a0enough to settle the constant question of &#8220;Why a goblin?&#8221; William Gass talks about\u00a0Emma Bovary\u2019s changing eye color. Her eye color changes in the novel. But her name is always Emma Bovary.\u00a0She believes and behaves in fiction and\u00a0Flaubert\u00a0manipulates language in a way that means Emma Bovary. So we have this question, but if the fiction writer does her job then we accept the reality of the a made up person.<\/div>\n<div style=\"color: #222222\"><\/div>\n<div style=\"color: #222222\">My personal beliefs, however, are not nearly that consistent. But, my eyes are always brown.<\/div>\n<div style=\"color: #222222\"><\/div>\n<div style=\"color: #222222\">Writing for me is a way of trying to understand what those beliefs might be. In a nonfiction essay, however, I can accept myself as\u00a0inconsistent. I may act like Matt\u00a0Briggs one day or I may act like Emma Bovary the next.\u00a0I do not have to convince the reader of my existence because unlike Emma Bovary I really do occupy material space.\u00a0There are other things besides language to verify my existence.\u00a0That lack of coherence is something that has the same kind of meaning as anything observed. I may try to represent myself in language, but I am also trying to discover or map myself as well in nonfiction.\u00a0In nonfiction there is something to map.\u00a0While nonfiction also requires\u00a0selection, the selection\u00a0is bound by what was really there\u00a0or\u00a0the memory of what was there. The past in so far as it exists in\u00a0memory has some fictional attributes, but\u00a0even the haziest memory either has a poor memory or is a liar and is telling you fiction.\u00a0The boundary, then, between a lie and a memory is the boundary between how I access my personal beliefs in fiction and nonfiction.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;My personal beliefs, however, are not nearly that consistent. But, my eyes are always brown<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":10483,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","writer-bryce-emley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12863"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12887,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12863\/revisions\/12887"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}